Archive for the ‘30th Amendment fo the Constitution’ tag

SO, MY FIRST real blog post in well over a year. I won’t make the usual ill-fated apology about trying to do more in future – variety is the spice of life, etc etc – but instead want to put across an observation about the current lie of the Irish political land.

The presidential election has been and gone, and frankly there is little left to say other than to wish Michael D the very best for his impending tenure. He’s been given a pretty hefty mandate – the largest that any person has ever won in Irish electoral history; only on six occasions (all of them referenda) have the people voted in larger numbers for a common end – and my personal hope is that he does his best to use it. It has always struck me as a political curiosity that the President (mandate 1,007,104 votes, from voters in 43 constituencies) could be politically neutered by a Taoiseach (mandate 17,472 votes, from only one constituency); it would be a personal hope that the cabinet might keep the new President’s electoral standing in mind if he should give them a subtle nudge towards a particular social goal.

Anyway, specifically I wanted to make a note on the aftermath of the two constitutional referenda from last week, and the potential impact that the fallout might have on the government’s plans to make inroads on the one place that almost everyone wants it to succeed: political reform. Read the rest of this entry »